I use blueprints for all my historical builds. They do not shape a fuselage, but they provide an image behind your build that you can use to give your fuselage (and wings) the right shape.
(Ps, I gotten into the habit when I download a plan from the Internet to first actually color it blue so it is easier to distinguish the background from the fuselage pieces you work on)
Also you can use them to project a background image of your planes flying right behind your plane so this will show up in your screenshot of the plane when you publish it.
@canadianavgeek853 finally:;the plane has trouble keeping straight when taking off due to the long wing. Consider increasing the surface of the vertical stabilizer.
@canadianavgeek853 also: the plane is very sensitive on roll- input. You can make tht ailerons smaller or slimmer or if you have the overload editor installed, you can click the wing and in the editor select 'controlsurface' and set the 'maximumdedlection' to a lower value like from 35° to 20. That worked wonderful on my copy.
Also, apparently you have two ailerons per wing, so close together they look like one. Consider deleting one of them and edit the other to span the whole length of the wings
@canadianavgeek853 ok. First off: You can delete he orbit camera as it doesn't do anything in this plane. Basically an orbit camera gives you the same functionality as the standard camera that comes with your cockpit. But if the camera somehow gets detached from the plane, the views follow the camera. Typically you use the camera for something like a launchable parachutist or a ship's sloop so you can follow the choose between following the aircraft flying on or the parachutist jumping (or the ship and the sloop.) Here, as you already have a cockpit with camera, you won't need the extra one.
@Karsond I would prefer that you can see at least part of him. The idea of the challenge is to show him showing off his plane (car, boat, rocket tank.....)
I ran I to that problem a couple of times. You used a hollow fuselage for your top block. Hollow fuselages are very picky to where you attach your pistons or rotators. Basically their front and back attachment points don't work. You have to connect your rotators to the arrow that is sticking out of the side of the hollow fuselage, not to the one at the end. Once I did this, I got it to work.
!here's the picture
Can I request a flying crane version? For a helicopter that looks like something from the 1960's Soviet Union, that's exactly what they would have done with it too.
@Kingsman472 me too, but it's pretty hard to get a helicopter to fly decently without one, even if you don't use he gyroscope for steering and keep it just for stabilization. My helicopters always oversteer without one.
Whish I would have known about your problems with the cowling. We have one of them parked at our local airport. Some local enthusiast with too much money spends his time restoring and flying it.
The flight computer has to be rotated. In the placement editor it's rotation needs to say: 0° x-axis, 0° y-axis, 0° z-axis, otherwise the chase view is messed up.
Once this was taken care of, it's a pretty nice plane and a surprisingly nice flyer. Mr Coats approves
@WinsWings works pretty good. In fact I got most of my starting knowledge from this tutorial . My only gripe is that the RCN nozzles could be explained better. (From what I know now) They are SimplePlanes' solution to moving the plane in hover mode
@WinsWings yea, he's a charmer. That's why I can't deny him to have his own plane, or car I stead of just looking over my shoulder when I am flying SimplePlanes
Did I see this right? Your engine is a rotator block with four wings attached to it? Kudos ... I claim the 50th upvote for this thing. Though to be sure, you deserved that upvote alone for using shock absorbers in your landing gear already.
Love this plane. It's well thought-out with many details other builders, especially with less than one year of experience, either overlook or don't care about. Also, again like many other planes of builders with more experience, the flying characteristics are pleasant and generally free of vices. And the incide view from the cockpit adds a nice layer of complexity. Congratulations.
Not bad for 46 parts, and it is a pleasure to fly as well. I do have some suggestions for improvements, primarily to make the tail wheel steerable for better taxiing. But I'm not here to criticize. I just enjoy flying the.plane too much
That being said....
1) move the outer two of your five cannons forward until you can see the 'base', that's the bigger back part of the cannon. Apparently That's where SimplePlanes thinks the shells are coming from. If you bury the base completely in the fuselage, the plane will blow itself up
2) replace the back landing gear with a short retractable one. In order for the airplane to rise you have to be able to push the tail down. With four wheels of equal length, you literally have to pivot on your back wheels before you can gain any height.
@Trainz448 I must be getting deja vu experiences. I swear that just last weekend I downloaded a plane with exactly the same wing arrangement and the same engine pods
@WinsWings then you might consider changing the input for the rear engine from ' 'Throttle' to 'Throttle+a*Trim+b*Pitch' with a around 0.5 and b about 0.2. the exact numbers will depend on tht aircraft and will have to be tweaked by lots of flight testing.
Look how I did with my Golden Rocketship. The front bottom 2 engines do the trim, the Pitch is added to the rear bottom 2 engines. (The clamp(rate(Altitude)-0.5, -1,0) factor is the automatic descent control. It kicks in when the rate of descent is bigger than 0.5....)
Do you use engine power or propeller pitch for thrust control? I think Pitch might give a quicker response but I'm not sure as I haven't tested it yet.
(I assume you use differential thrust on the front and back engines to control pitch in hover mode)
Not bad for a first build with standard blocks. Yes, landing can be tricky, especially with the massive power of the turboprop. But apart of that, it flies surprisingly well.
@Ninja451 if you need some ideas on how to make a wing brake, a year ago, I uploaded a demonstrator aircraft that uses a dummy wing bureied inside the main wing to 'pull out' air brakes. May be you can take a look.
Nice upgrade from the previous plane. However still no limiter on the engine travel, meaning you can crash it k to your own fuselage if you're not carefully and pull Trim too far down. Also for my taste it relies too much on the gyro with for instance roll and yaw not even possible by areodynamical means (ailerons and rudders are for show only). Still visually a feast to behold
Not bad for 90 pieces. One gripe though: switch the input for the engine mount rotators from 'VTOL' to 'clamp(VTOL,0,1)'. Otherwise, if you slide the VTOL slider backwards, even by mistake, the props will hack into the fuselage and self-destruct.
@MiloAviation here's what I have on my computer: https://ibb.co/JLCQ0Kq a pretty complete picture of all the Fokker F-7 variants found in the Internet. Apparently copied from a Russian magazine.
As you can see, there are two types of wings. The short wing from the one-engined F-7 and the early 3-enfined ones and a long-wing used for many of the record-setting aircraft. The short wing remained a standard for many short/medium ranged passenger transports.
Engines were the seven-cylinder Wright Whirlwind in the earlier versions and the nine-cylinder ones in the later. Variants with five-cylinder Bristol and Gnome-Rhone engines have been known to fly as well.
https://ibb.co/zT8NdR5v The Fokker T-2 was a long-wing nine-cylinder F-7 built for the US Air Force. The 'Friendship' was the first T-2, given to admiral Richard Byrd for a record flight across the Atlantic. Note the 'American-style' forward sloping windshield and the larger elevator. The blue aircraft below is the 'Southern Cross' from Australian aviation pioneer Charles Kingsford-Smith. This was the prototype long-wing Fokker that somehow ended up in storage in California where Smith bought it pretty much at scrap value and extensively upgraded it. Note the non-standard engine mounts and tail plane.
Finally, https://ibb.co/qYhBWzPp are the drawings I made for my wooden toys. I include them here because they show the different fuselages and rudders in detail.
@Ninja451 couple pf quick things:
1) The vertical control surfaces on the twin fins move the wrong way Change the value for 'control.surface-invert' from False to true
2) set the value for auto-center for tht cockpit camera from 'true' to 'false' so you can look around in tht cockpit
3) the joystick in the cockpit has a value 'length' play with it until you can just see the top of the joystick.while looking straight ahead
Also:
+ The writings on the switches in the Cockpit are really hard to read. May be use a different color
+ Landing is really hard. You need to at least quadruple tht since of tht air brakes to have any effect: increase their 'drag' value, use a large dummy wing as air brake or five the plane a braking parachute.
I use blueprints for all my historical builds. They do not shape a fuselage, but they provide an image behind your build that you can use to give your fuselage (and wings) the right shape.
(Ps, I gotten into the habit when I download a plan from the Internet to first actually color it blue so it is easier to distinguish the background from the fuselage pieces you work on)
Also you can use them to project a background image of your planes flying right behind your plane so this will show up in your screenshot of the plane when you publish it.
@canadianavgeek853 finally:;the plane has trouble keeping straight when taking off due to the long wing. Consider increasing the surface of the vertical stabilizer.
But that it for now
+1No problem. Just post it anyway. As long as it runs halfway decent on a recent model smart phone it should be good
@canadianavgeek853 also: the plane is very sensitive on roll- input. You can make tht ailerons smaller or slimmer or if you have the overload editor installed, you can click the wing and in the editor select 'controlsurface' and set the 'maximumdedlection' to a lower value like from 35° to 20. That worked wonderful on my copy.
Also, apparently you have two ailerons per wing, so close together they look like one. Consider deleting one of them and edit the other to span the whole length of the wings
+1@canadianavgeek853 ok. First off: You can delete he orbit camera as it doesn't do anything in this plane. Basically an orbit camera gives you the same functionality as the standard camera that comes with your cockpit. But if the camera somehow gets detached from the plane, the views follow the camera. Typically you use the camera for something like a launchable parachutist or a ship's sloop so you can follow the choose between following the aircraft flying on or the parachutist jumping (or the ship and the sloop.) Here, as you already have a cockpit with camera, you won't need the extra one.
+1Nice little plane with a great look.
+1@Karsond I would prefer that you can see at least part of him. The idea of the challenge is to show him showing off his plane (car, boat, rocket tank.....)
I ran I to that problem a couple of times. You used a hollow fuselage for your top block. Hollow fuselages are very picky to where you attach your pistons or rotators. Basically their front and back attachment points don't work. You have to connect your rotators to the arrow that is sticking out of the side of the hollow fuselage, not to the one at the end. Once I did this, I got it to work.
!here's the picture
Love the way you used Mr. Coats' paint schemes for the whole plane
No problem. Posing is just taking the parts in the 'spanner tool' and moving and rotating it.
A tailhook on an F-16?????
+1Ps, how did you get the label to display Cyrillic letters?
Can I request a flying crane version? For a helicopter that looks like something from the 1960's Soviet Union, that's exactly what they would have done with it too.
Wait, is this just a tutorial plane in blue with a 5-blade propellers?
+1So if I get it right, the idea is to rebound the tutorial plane?
@Kingsman472 me too, but it's pretty hard to get a helicopter to fly decently without one, even if you don't use he gyroscope for steering and keep it just for stabilization. My helicopters always oversteer without one.
And you did all that without using a gyroscope?
Congratulations
+1@MonsNotTheMonster I'll drive by the airport and see if it is out there so I can take a picture
+1Whish I would have known about your problems with the cowling. We have one of them parked at our local airport. Some local enthusiast with too much money spends his time restoring and flying it.
+1@WinsWings I sent a link on discord for the first draft of the tutorial
+1Hahaha... Didn't think someone would take my suggestion of a parachute and a bottle rocket seriously. Nice job. Mr.Coats will live it
The flight computer has to be rotated. In the placement editor it's rotation needs to say: 0° x-axis, 0° y-axis, 0° z-axis, otherwise the chase view is messed up.
Once this was taken care of, it's a pretty nice plane and a surprisingly nice flyer. Mr Coats approves
Some issues with stability and the landing gear is too far aft for my taste. Still it has potential. Looking forwards to your next versions
Nice plane, love the details, still, 500mph in forward flight? Me thinks you is a little overpowered
+1@caid0ngming ok. So now you got to take the figure and build an airplane around it, or a kiddie car
@WinsWings still writing my tutorial, but ll take it for a little spin after work tomorrow
+1Challenge accepted....
Have I ever... A 50 ft. 900 mph Canadian goose....
@WinsWings works pretty good. In fact I got most of my starting knowledge from this tutorial . My only gripe is that the RCN nozzles could be explained better. (From what I know now) They are SimplePlanes' solution to moving the plane in hover mode
+1July 2 nd? Forgive me if I pass. By July 2nd I may be have detailed sketches of what I am about to build.
@WinsWings yea, he's a charmer. That's why I can't deny him to have his own plane, or car I stead of just looking over my shoulder when I am flying SimplePlanes
+2Did I see this right? Your engine is a rotator block with four wings attached to it? Kudos ... I claim the 50th upvote for this thing. Though to be sure, you deserved that upvote alone for using shock absorbers in your landing gear already.
+2Love this plane. It's well thought-out with many details other builders, especially with less than one year of experience, either overlook or don't care about. Also, again like many other planes of builders with more experience, the flying characteristics are pleasant and generally free of vices. And the incide view from the cockpit adds a nice layer of complexity. Congratulations.
+1Not bad for 46 parts, and it is a pleasure to fly as well. I do have some suggestions for improvements, primarily to make the tail wheel steerable for better taxiing. But I'm not here to criticize. I just enjoy flying the.plane too much
That being said....
1) move the outer two of your five cannons forward until you can see the 'base', that's the bigger back part of the cannon. Apparently That's where SimplePlanes thinks the shells are coming from. If you bury the base completely in the fuselage, the plane will blow itself up
2) replace the back landing gear with a short retractable one. In order for the airplane to rise you have to be able to push the tail down. With four wheels of equal length, you literally have to pivot on your back wheels before you can gain any height.
@WinsWings yea, see me grow. Now I already got 1/70 of your points. At that rate I might overtake you by 2050
+1@Trainz448 I must be getting deja vu experiences. I swear that just last weekend I downloaded a plane with exactly the same wing arrangement and the same engine pods
Did you reupload this one? I think I saw something almost exactly like that a week ago
@WinsWings then you might consider changing the input for the rear engine from '
'Throttle' to 'Throttle+a*Trim+b*Pitch' with a around 0.5 and b about 0.2. the exact numbers will depend on tht aircraft and will have to be tweaked by lots of flight testing.
Look how I did with my Golden Rocketship. The front bottom 2 engines do the trim, the Pitch is added to the rear bottom 2 engines. (The clamp(rate(Altitude)-0.5, -1,0) factor is the automatic descent control. It kicks in when the rate of descent is bigger than 0.5....)
+1Do you use engine power or propeller pitch for thrust control? I think Pitch might give a quicker response but I'm not sure as I haven't tested it yet.
(I assume you use differential thrust on the front and back engines to control pitch in hover mode)
Not bad for a first build with standard blocks. Yes, landing can be tricky, especially with the massive power of the turboprop. But apart of that, it flies surprisingly well.
@Ninja451 if you need some ideas on how to make a wing brake, a year ago, I uploaded a demonstrator aircraft that uses a dummy wing bureied inside the main wing to 'pull out' air brakes. May be you can take a look.
Cigogne-STOL-testbed
The dummy wing is symmetrical.so it doesn't affect the main wing when flying. It's drag is set to 5 in xml
+1Marvelous visuals, marvelous flying characteristics. I call on @Jundroo to make this the standard demonstrator helicopter in their new game.
One gripe though: 2500 hp.on tht rotor is overkill. The helicopter flies perfectly, even better, with only 250
+2Nice upgrade from the previous plane. However still no limiter on the engine travel, meaning you can crash it k to your own fuselage if you're not carefully and pull Trim too far down. Also for my taste it relies too much on the gyro with for instance roll and yaw not even possible by areodynamical means (ailerons and rudders are for show only). Still visually a feast to behold
Not bad for 90 pieces. One gripe though: switch the input for the engine mount rotators from 'VTOL' to 'clamp(VTOL,0,1)'. Otherwise, if you slide the VTOL slider backwards, even by mistake, the props will hack into the fuselage and self-destruct.
You can shave one piece off if you make one side of the vertical stabilizer a square, pull it to the middle and then delete the other
@MiloAviation here's what I have on my computer:
https://ibb.co/JLCQ0Kq a pretty complete picture of all the Fokker F-7 variants found in the Internet. Apparently copied from a Russian magazine.
As you can see, there are two types of wings. The short wing from the one-engined F-7 and the early 3-enfined ones and a long-wing used for many of the record-setting aircraft. The short wing remained a standard for many short/medium ranged passenger transports.
Engines were the seven-cylinder Wright Whirlwind in the earlier versions and the nine-cylinder ones in the later. Variants with five-cylinder Bristol and Gnome-Rhone engines have been known to fly as well.
https://ibb.co/1JRZHXVJ and https://ibb.co/ymfB3qrK seven-cylinder short-wing passenger planes from the Netherlands and Switzerland respectively.
https://ibb.co/zT8NdR5v The Fokker T-2 was a long-wing nine-cylinder F-7 built for the US Air Force. The 'Friendship' was the first T-2, given to admiral Richard Byrd for a record flight across the Atlantic. Note the 'American-style' forward sloping windshield and the larger elevator. The blue aircraft below is the 'Southern Cross' from Australian aviation pioneer Charles Kingsford-Smith. This was the prototype long-wing Fokker that somehow ended up in storage in California where Smith bought it pretty much at scrap value and extensively upgraded it. Note the non-standard engine mounts and tail plane.
Finally, https://ibb.co/qYhBWzPp are the drawings I made for my wooden toys. I include them here because they show the different fuselages and rudders in detail.
This is hands down the easiest plane to land on an aircraft carrier. Especially if you tweak the air brakes to deploy on (engine) brake as well.
+1@Ninja451 couple pf quick things:
1) The vertical control surfaces on the twin fins move the wrong way Change the value for 'control.surface-invert' from False to true
2) set the value for auto-center for tht cockpit camera from 'true' to 'false' so you can look around in tht cockpit
3) the joystick in the cockpit has a value 'length' play with it until you can just see the top of the joystick.while looking straight ahead
Also:
+1+ The writings on the switches in the Cockpit are really hard to read. May be use a different color
+ Landing is really hard. You need to at least quadruple tht since of tht air brakes to have any effect: increase their 'drag' value, use a large dummy wing as air brake or five the plane a braking parachute.